Riaz Haq writes this data-driven blog to provide information, express his opinions and make comments on many topics. Subjects include personal activities, education, South Asia, South Asian community, regional and international affairs and US politics to financial markets. For investors interested in South Asia, Riaz has another blog called South Asia Investor at http://southasiainvestor.blogspot.com and a YouTube video channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkrIDyFbC9N9evXYb9cA_gQ

Friday, January 5, 2018

India's former RAW officers, including one ex chief, have blamed Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav, arrested by Pakistan in 2016, for getting caught in Pakistan as a "result of unprofessionalism", according to a report in India's "The Quint" owned and operated by a joint venture of Bloomberg News and Quintillion Media. The report that appeared briefly on The Quint website has since been removed, apparently under pressure from the Indian government.

The Quint Story:

Indian Agent Kulbhushan Jadhav

The story quotes a former RAW chief as saying that the “proposal to recruit Jadhav for operations, whatever it’s worth, was ridiculous.” However, the report said that "(Jadhav's) recruitment was approved by a joint secretary as the supervisory officer. The RAW has a special unit which also undertakes parallel operations in certain crucial target countries for which it seeks out its own recruits".

Several experienced RAW hands told the Quint that the usual practice is to “have a Baloch or a Pakistani national” do the “intelligence gathering job for us", adding that it was “foolish for to set an Indian the task to obtain intelligence from a country as hostile as Pakistan.”

This is only the second story in the Indian media to acknowledge Jadhav's status as a covert RAW operative in Balochistan.

Karan Thapar's Questions:

An earlier story by Indian journalist Karan Thapar pointed out several flaws in the Indian narrative claiming that Jadhav was an innocent Indian businessman kidnapped from Chabahar by Pakistani agents.

Writing for the Indian Express, Thapar debunked the entire official story from New Delhi by raising the following probing questions:

1. Jadhav's Two Passports:

Thapar asks why does Jadhav have two passports, one in his own name and another in the name of Hussein Mubarak Patel?

According to The Indian Express, the second passport was originally issued in 2003 and renewed in 2014. The passport numbers are E6934766 and L9630722. When asked, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson would only say that India needs access to Jadhav before he could answer. But why not check the records attached to the passport numbers? Surely they would tell a story?

Additionally, The Times of India claims that since 2007, Jadhav has rented a Bombay flat owned by his mother, Avanti, in the name of Hussein Mubarak Patel. Why would he use an alias to rent his own mother’s flat? Perhaps Jadhav changed his name after converting to Islam? But then, why did he deliberately retain a valid passport in his old name? Indeed, why did the government let him, unless he deceived them?

2. Abduction From Iran:

If Pakistan did abduct Jadhav, don’t we need to ask why, asks Thapar? Doesn’t that raise the question of what was so special about him that made them do this? After all, there are 4,000 Indians in Chabahar, Iran — and no one else has been abducted.

If Jadhav was indeed abducted from the Iranian soil, then why did India not pursue the matter with Iran, but, as the Indian foreign ministry spokesperson admitted, they don’t seem to have responded or, perhaps, even conducted an investigation yet. India seems to have accepted that. Odd, wouldn’t you say, asks Thapar?

3. Timing of Jadhav's Arrest:

Both The Indian Express and Asian Age suggest that Jadhav has links with the Pakistani drug baron Uzair Baloch who's also accused of terror in Pakistan. Did Jadhav play dirty with him and get caught in a revenge trap set by the drug mafia? Given that Jadhav was arrested a month after Baloch was taken into custody by Pakistan, this could be part of the explanation?

4. Jadhav's Pursuit of RAW Employment:

The Indian Express has reported that between 2010 and 2012, Jadhav made three separate attempts to join the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). The paper suggests he also tried to join the Technical Services Division. What more do we know about this? Even if the media doesn’t, surely the government does? A. S. Dulat, a distinguished former chief of RAW, has unhesitatingly said Jadhav could be a spy. As he put it, if he (Dulat) was in the government, he would hardly admit it.

Summary:

The Quint story and Karan Thapar's article dismantle the false narrative that the Indian and western media have been pushing since Kulbhushan Jadhav's arrest in Balochistan in March, 2016. These reports are beginning to essentially confirm that Jadhav's confession on orchestrating murderous attacks in Pakistan is factual.

Jadhav, who last visited Mumbai some four months back, was under watch by the Pakistani agencies during his movements in Iranian cities in the course of his work, his close friends from Mumbai police told this newspaper. Jadhav could have been honey-trapped before his arrest and then subjected to ruthless methods of interrogation and torture to extract information from him over a period of several weeks, they feel. The family had lost contact with Jadhav since February leading to the suspicion that he was in the custody of Pakistan for a while now.

As a result, two other local contacts who were supposed to provide back-up assistance to Jadhav are also reportedly missing for over a month. The standard operating procedure is to always have some 'contacts' on standby to be the contact persons in times of emergency or when there is total blackout of communications and inaccessibility of the person of interest. Both the Indian contacts are inaccessible and have probably gone underground or are on the run - unless they have already been arrested and thrown behind bars -- disclosed officers from the Mumbai police.

The fallout of the Jadhav's arrest is the frantic counterwinding operations launched by the Indian agencies in India as also in Pakistan. According to experts, the operations which are connected to an operative have to be immediately erased or folded up soon after he is outed so that there is always a plausible deniability.

Shirish Thorat, New York-based security expert and former Indian police officer said, "In the event of an asset getting arrested the handlers immediately secure other related assets like Agents in Places (AIP) or regroup their operations and fold up all the ongoing or future tasks. This discontinuation of operations is far monumental a disaster than the arrest of an operative." In Jadhav's case too, the agencies have launched an expeditious exercise to retrace his footsteps and shut down all of his possible ongoing operations. The first step is to disown Jadhav as their operative and also ask the family to disassociate with him. Jadhav's family wanted to approach the top echelons of the government, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah, to exert pressure on Pakistan to release him.

When asked whether the ministry of external affairs has officially informed the Mumbai police so that the Jadhav family can be intimated about his arrest in Pakistan, Deven Bharti, joint commissioner of police (law and order), replied in negative.

What the Kulbhushan Jadhav Saga Reveals About India and Pakistan’s Balochistan ProblemsIndia’s Quint published and deleted a story alleging that Jadhav was indeed spying for India. What does that tell us?

This weekend, a report in India surfaced that confirmed Kulbhushan Jadhav was an asset of Indian intelligence. Jadhav, a former Indian naval officer, is currently on death row in Pakistan for spying, having been captured in Balochistan in early 2016. Until now, New Delhi has publicly denied that Jadhav had any relationship with the Indian state since his retirement from the navy. To the contrary, New Delhi alleged that Jadhav was a legitimate businessman kidnapped from Iran by Pakistan’s intelligence services.

The “legitimate businessman” façade has slowly been chipped away over 18 months. Leaving aside major complications in India’s story, such as Iran’s silence in the face of this ostensibly daring violation of its sovereignty, even reporters closely tied to India’s security establishment revealed that Jadhav offered to spy for Indian intelligence “several times” between 2010 and 2012, only to be rebuffed. What was new about this weekend’s report, however, was that for the first time, an Indian outlet essentially confirmed Pakistan’s version of events. In the report, both serving and retired Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) officers claimed that Jadhav was indeed spying for India in Balochistan.

The reaction was swift. Minutes after being published, the article was vociferously denounced by Indian journalists and analysts on social media, and in the comments section by readers, as being irresponsible and treacherous. Hours later, the article was taken down entirely. Though an archived version of the article still exists, there is otherwise no trace of it ever being written. The author and editor in question have not publicly explained why or how the article was published or taken down. There has been no follow up to the article’s startling admission by major newspapers or television channels.----------

South Asia is no stranger to the phenomenon of external actors intervening in their neighbors’ domestic conflicts. Most famously in 1971, during Pakistan’s civil war, India corralled, trained, and supplied the Mukti Bahini, which became strong enough to be one of the very few rebel groups to win a secessionist war and change an international border. Pakistan, for its part, has repeatedly sought to spark or fuel rebellion in Kashmir, most prominently in the early 1990s, as well as other secessionist hotspots, such as Punjab in the 1980s or the Indian northeast in the 1960s. Bangladesh and Myanmar have hosted militants targeting India’s northeast. India has returned the favor with each, and supported Tamil militants taking on the Sri Lankan state in the 1980s too.

-----------------Unlike India, the country most beset by secessionism, Pakistan does not have manifold separatist movements threatening its territorial integrity today. With the loss of East Pakistan in 1971, and the dampening of Sindhi and Pashtun nationalism in the last four decades, Pakistan finds itself much closer to Sri Lanka than its eastern neighbor: facing one, and only one, major separatist movement.

he implications of the questions raised by the Kulbhushan Jadhav case go far beyond Jadhav’s fate. It is time India reflects seriously on its expanding programme of covert action and its long-term consequences. By PRAVEEN SWAMIFOR six hours, the hired car had driven through a forest of shadows, cast by the mountains of Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province—for generations, a refuge for smugglers, insurgents and spies. Heading towards Saravan, a town of 50,000 some 20 kilometres from the border with Pakistan, the car was carrying a businessman from Mumbai to a meeting. The men he wanted to meet were waiting, but there were others, too: like every spy story, this one ended in betrayal.

India knows something of what happened next: Kulbhushan Jadhav is now on death row, awaiting execution, after a hurried trial by a military court in Pakistan which found him guilty of espionage.

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Ever since 2013, India has secretly built up a covert action programme against Pakistan, seeking to retaliate against jehadists and deter their sponsors in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate. Led by National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, and now by Research and Analysis Wing’s (RAW) Anil Dhasmana, the programme has registered unprecedented success, hitting hard against organisations such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Muhammad. But the story of the man on death row illustrates that this secret war is not risk-free. Lapses in tradecraft and judgment, inevitable parts of any human enterprise, can inflict harm far greater than the good they seek to secure.

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the Kulbhushan Jadhav case ought to raise questions about whether India’s intelligence bosses are devoting the kind of granular attention that the issue requires to insulate the country from the potential risks. The questions over Jadhav’s passports, the opacity of his business operations and, most important, the lack of transparency about his connection to the Indian Navy, have all made it difficult for the government of India to dissociate itself from his cause—the usual, necessary fate of the spy. It is also not clear why, if he is indeed a spy, he was not withdrawn after Uzair Baluch’s arrest, an elementary precaution.

Perhaps more importantly, there ought to be a serious political debate cutting across party lines on the possible consequences of covert action.

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Precedents do exist to resolve situations like this. Gary Powers, the pilot of a CIA espionage flight shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960—and reviled by his colleagues for not committing suicide—was eventually exchanged for the legendary KGB spy Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher.

In both New Delhi and Islamabad, there are rumours the two capitals are working on just such a deal—possibly involving former ISI officer Lieutenant Colonel Mohammad Zahir Habib, alleged to have been kidnapped by India—or a wider deal, which could see the release of multiple espionage convicts.

Both countries have much to gain from a dispassionate conversation on the case—on the norms that ought to govern covert activity of the one against the other, and on the inexorable consequences of the secret war Pakistan has long run.

For that, the Kulbhushan Jadhav case needs to be elevated above prime-time ranting and opened up for rational discussion.

How #KulbushanJadhav led #India’s covert war in #Pakistan: Jadhav and #PPP affiliated #Karachi gangster Uzair Baloch developed a pivotal relationship 2014 onwards. Uzair's #Iranian passport enable him to freely move in and out of #Chahabar.

Indian magazine Frontline, a publication of renowned newspaper The Hindu has revealed detailed accounts of India’s secret war inside Pakistan involving terrorist Kulbushan Jadhav, National Security Advisor (NSA), Ajit Kumar Doval and chiefs of the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW).

How it all started

Kulbushan Sudhir Jadhav bearing service number 41558Z was inducted into the Indian Navy in 1987, according to The Gazette of India which records promotions, commissioning and retirement of military officials.Two Indian navy officials relay that Jadhav’s transition into the notorious spy world began after the parliament house attack in 2001 when the Indian navy was setting up nine naval detachments to monitor the Maharashtra and Gujarat coasts but they lacked an independent intelligence capacity to monitor threats from across the sea.

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In 2006, the Balochistan insurgency exploded and the Indian intelligence community pressured their stations in Afghanistan to develop more contacts in the region.

“Our new asset in Chabahar soon began to be drawn into counterterrorism work for the Intelligence Bureau – raising fears that the fact that he was still on the organisation’s payroll could lead to embarrassment,” stated Indian Naval Intelligence officials.

According to sources, the Indian Navy Chief, Admiral Arun Prakash’s resistance to these efforts was overruled by the Indian Intelligence bosses because they were desperate for assets.

“The Navy was extremely worried about the possible consequences of the tasks being assigned to Jadhav by the Intelligence Bureau. However, we were basically told that since he was there, that was how it needed to be,” said one officer.

“The push to draw Jadhav into front-line intelligence work was driven by the IB’s ambitions to have an independent overseas role. RAW’s own intelligence capacities in the region, they argued, were more than adequate to address emerging threats,” stated former RAW officials.

Sources said that Jadhav gave an idea about a reprisal attack on Karachi in case another 26/11 attack takes place which grasped the attention of top Indian intelligence officials.

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Relationship with Uzair Baloch

Sources confirmed that Jadhav and Uzair Baloch, a Karachi-based ganglord developed a pivotal relationship 2014 onwards. Due to the latter’s Iranian passport, he was able to freely move in and out of Chahabar.Jadhav’s next door neighbour was Jaleel Baloch who happened to be Uzair Baloch’s nephew. He used to take cash from Jadhav in return for useful information.

Pakistan military sources insist that Jadhav made at least five deliveries of a huge cache of weapons to terrorists supporting the Baloch liberation movement.

“Baloch was involved in espionage activities, by providing secret information/sketches regarding Army installations and officials to foreign agents,” reiterates an official Pakistani investigation document. However, the material he handed over appeared to be low grade.

Last year Uzair Baloch was arrested in Abu Dhabi by the Interpol and handed over to Pakistani authorities.

“Baloch’s interrogation, eventually led the ISI to the Indian whose operations in Chahbahar had gone undetected for over a decade,” Pakistani official sources confirmed.

Subsequently, in April 2017, Baloch admitted in his testimony that he was in touch with terrorist Kulbushan Jadhav and Iranian intelligence.

Dr. Jumma Marri Baloch, a prominent leader of the Baloch independence movement and designer of the separatist flag, recently renounced his decades-long campaign against Pakistan while attending a Pakistani Unity Day event last weekend in Moscow, where Sputnik’s Andrew Korybko had the chance to conduct a brief interview with him.

Sputnik: Tell us little about yourself: how and why did you come to Russia, how long have you been here and what do you do presently?

Jumma Marri Baloch: I think everybody who was interested about the Baloch affairs might know my struggle to free Balochistan, which is not hidden from anyone. I will not be wrong if I say that I am from those people who were always on the forefront of the Baloch freedom struggle — many of the readers might know the fact that the Free Balochistan flag, which is currently very popular and is in use, was designed by me.----For the sake of Free Balochistan I left my home, Pakistan, province, tribe and even my father and brothers. In 1979, due to the Balochistan movement I, along with my family, left for Afghanistan and settled there. Since 2000 I am in self-exile in Moscow.

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Sputnik: Who is behind the so-called "Free Balochistan" Campaign, what are they aiming for, and how do they operate?

Jumma Marri Baloch: There are no doubts that India is squarely behind the unrest in Balochistan. I am a witness to it from within: India tries to counter Pakistan's support for Kashmir and India wants to pay Pakistan in the same coin by supporting a few so-called Baloch leaders who are enjoying very luxurious lifestyles in such expensive cities as Geneva and London. These people are sending some money to create unrest in Balochistan like blowing electricity supplies, mining bridges and putting mines in the roadside to keep the money supplies open from Delhi.

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Sputnik: What is the reason why some international media have been repeating the claims of Baloch separatists and sometimes even lobbying on their behalf, and how does this relate to global fake news industry?

Jumma Marri Baloch: No international media pays any attention to these Baloch separatists except Indian media that are working closely with the Indian intelligence who are paid to cover their paid agents working as Baloch freedom fighters. These are all Indian attempts to silence the voices of the Kashmir struggle for freedom. I guarantee if Pakistan gives even the slightest hint to the Indians that they will stop supporting the Kashmiri, the Hindus will dump the Baloch next day down in a sewage canal.

Sputnik: What is the most effective way to debunk these falsehoods and show people the truth about Balochistan and its native people's relationship to the rest of Pakistan?

Jumma Marri Baloch: Develop the awareness of people about the negative propaganda, through education and empowering the local people to run their affairs without intervention. The Baloch must be respected, first of all, on their own soil, then such negative propaganda will have no effects. The majority of the Baloch people have no problem with Pakistan, but they have questions to the government as every normal citizen of any country around the world.

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About Me

I am the Founder and President of PakAlumni Worldwide, a global social network for Pakistanis, South Asians and their friends. I also served as Chairman of the NEDians Convention 2007. In addition to being a South Asia watcher, an investor, business consultant and avid follower of the world financial markets, I have more than 25 years experience in the hi-tech industry. I have been on the faculties of Rutgers University and NED Engineering University and cofounded two high-tech startups, Cautella, Inc. and DynArray Corp and managed multi-million dollar P&Ls. I am a pioneer of the PC and mobile businesses and I have held senior management positions in hardware and software development of Intel’s microprocessor product line from 8086 to Pentium processors. My experience includes senior roles in marketing, engineering and business management. I was recognized as “Person of the Year” by PC Magazine for my contribution to 80386 program. I have an MS degree in Electrical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
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